Author: Geoffrey Gibson

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Lessons from the massacre at Glencoe

About six or so years ago, I put out two notes about the consequences of the massacre at Glencoe, one of the most revolting episodes in the history of Britain.  I leave it to others to say whether any of the discussion may bear on lethal conflicts in the world today.

One post

The Clan McDonald (or Macdonald) of Glencoe was a band of robbers.  Most Highlanders were.  The Campbells of Argyle hated them and they had ruthlessly preyed on a man named Breadalbane.  The British Crown offered money to all Highlanders to take an oath of allegiance by 31 December 1691.  Anyone who did not do so in time would be treated a traitor and outside the law.  Breadalbane was in charge of handling the money. The Highland chiefs dragged their feet but they came in.  The McDonald chief left it to the last day – but no one there could take his oath.  He finally got sworn six days later.  That the McDonald chief was outside the law was good news for the Campbells, Breadalbane and for the Scots Prime Minister, Sir John Dalrymple, known as the Master of Stair.  Dalrymple had hoped to strike at a number of clans. In a letter written in this expectation, he said ‘I hope the soldiers will not trouble the government with prisoners.’  Then he found out that McDonald had sworn his oath after the cut-off.  He resolved to strike at that clan.  Without saying that McDonald had taken the oath late, Dalrymple put an order before King William that said:

As for Mac Ian of Glencoe [the McDonald chief] and that tribe, if they can be well distinguished from the other Highlanders, it will be proper for the vindication of public justice to extirpate that set of thieves.

You can get an argument about what ‘extirpate’ might mean there – clean the glen out of these bandits by rooting them out (as the Scots  king swore to ‘root out’ heresies), or wipe  them out in the sense of killing all, including women and children?  A soldier killing a bandit might seek to rely on that order as a defence – but killing a woman or child?

The design of the Master of Stair was ‘to butcher the whole race of thieves, the whole damnable race.’  But the troops would not just march in and execute the condemned outlaws.  Dalrymple was afraid that most of them would escape. ‘Better not meddle with them than meddle to no purpose.  When the thing is resolved, let it be secret and sudden.’ Macbeth himself might have said that. 

The troops accepted the hospitality of the clan at Glencoe for twelve days.  Then at five o’clock in the morning, the troops started to kill men, women and children.  But they used firearms, and three quarters of the clan escaped the fate of their chief.

Macaulay could understand the hatred of Argyle and Breadalbane for the McDonalds, but Dalrymple – ‘one of the first men of his time, a jurist, a statesman, a fine scholar, an eloquent orator’?

To what cause are we to ascribe so strange an antipathy.  The most probable conjecture is that he was actuated by an inordinate, an unscrupulous, a remorseless zeal for what seemed to him to be the interest of the State.  This explanation may startle those who have not considered how large a proportion of the blackest crimes recorded in history is to be ascribed to ill regulated public spirit.  We daily see men do for their party, for their sect, for their country, for their favourite schemes of political and social reform, what they would not do to enrich or avenge themselves.  A temptation addressed to our private cupidity or to our private animosity, whatever virtue we have takes the alarm.  But virtue itself may contribute to the fall of him who imagines that it is in his power, by violating some general rule of morality, to confer an important benefit on a church on a commonwealth, on mankind.  He silences the remonstrances of conscience, and hardens his heart against the most touching spectacles of misery, by repeating to himself that his intentions are pure, that his objects are noble, that he is doing a little evil for the sake of a great good.  By degrees he comes altogether to forget the turpitude of the means in the excellence of the end, and at length perpetrates without one internal twinge acts which would shock a buccaneer. There is no reason to believe that Dominic would, for the best archbishopric in Christendom, have incited ferocious marauders to plunder and slaughter a peaceful and industrious population, that Everard Digby would, for a dukedom, have blown a large assembly of people into the air, or that Robespierre would have murdered for hire one of the thousands whom he murdered from philanthropy.

This analysis is vital.  There we have a description of our greatest enemy – the zealot who has God or the people on his side; the quintessential Catholic terrorist, Guy Fawkes; Robespierre and the people of la patrie; Osama bin Laden and the religion of Islam – all responsible for some of ‘the blackest crimes recorded in history’, and all convinced of the blackest falsity mankind has been guilty of – that the ends justify the means.

Dostoevsky put it this way.

One cannot live by rebellion, and I want to live.  Tell me straight out, I call on you –imagine me: imagine that you yourself are building the edifice of human destiny with the object of making people happy in the finale, of giving them peace and rest at last, but for that you must inevitably and unavoidably torture just one tiny creature, that same child who was beating her chest with her little fist, and raise your edifice on the foundation of her unrequited tears – would you agree to be the architect on such conditions?  Tell me the truth.

So the great Russian writer, in The Brothers Karamazov, foretold the misery that would flow over all of the Russias from the righteousness of Marx, Lenin and Stalin.

In the House of the Dead, Dostoevsky explained how we are corrupted by power.

Whoever has experienced the power, the unrestrained ability to humiliate another human being….automatically loses power over his own sensations.  Tyranny is a habit, it has its own organic life, it develops finally into a disease.  The habit can kill and coarsen the very best man to the level of a beast.  Blood and power intoxicate…The man and the citizen die with the tyrant forever; the return to human dignity, to repentance, to regeneration becomes almost impossible.

Those words are deathless because they are so true, but they have frightening ramifications for Donald Trump.

Shortly before citing those words, Paul Johnson referred to some equally relevant remarks of Joseph Conrad in Under Western Eyes in 1911:

In a real revolution, the best characters do not come to the front.  A violent revolution falls into the hands of narrow-minded fanatics and of tyrannical hypocrites at first.  Afterwards come the turn of all the pretentious intellectual failures of the time.  Such are the chiefs and the leaders.  You will notice that I have left out the mere rogues.  The scrupulous and the just, the noble humane and devoted natures, the unselfish and the intelligent may begin a revolution, but it passes away from them.  Hopes grotesquely betrayed, ideals caricatured – that is the definition of revolutionary success.

All that is so true of the French and Russian revolutions.  A Marxist historian applied this kind of learning to the Communist Party under Stalin: ‘The whole party became an organization of torturers and oppressors.  No one was innocent and all Communists were accomplices in the coercion of society.  Thus the party acquired a new species of moral unity, and embarked on a course from which there was no turning back.’  George Orwell saw all this.

The violence, the randomness, and the cruelty all come to be taken as part of life, and people become what we now call ‘desensitised’.  Commenting on the butchery that followed the fall of the Bastille, the French historian Taine reflected mordantly that some mockery is found in every triumph, and ‘beneath the butcher, the buffoon becomes apparent.’ 

The result is that the people become less civilised.  They are degraded.  You can get an argument over whether terror or ‘the Terror’ commenced on 14 July 1789, but there is no denying that bloody violence and lawless butchery erupted on that day and continued off and on until at least the time when Napoleon put a former break on hostilities with a whiff of grapeshot.  The nation itself was destabilised for the best part of a century.

To go back to Glencoe, who was to be answerable?  It was all hushed up for a while, but word got out, and there had to be a public inquiry.  It was full and fair, and its findings went to the Scots parliament, the Estates.  The commissioners of inquiry concluded that the slaughter at Glencoe was murder, and that the cause of that crime lay in the letters of Dalrymple, the Master of Stair.  They resolved with no dissenting voice that the order signed by King William did not authorise the slaughter at Glencoe.  But the Estates let Dalrymple off with a censure, while they designated the officers in charge as murderers.

Macaulay says they were wrong on both counts.

Whoever can bring himself to look at the conduct of these men with judicial impartiality will probably be of opinion that they could not, without great detriment to the commonwealth, have been treated as assassins.  They had slain no one whom they had not been positively directed by their commanding officer to slay.  That subordination without which an army would be the worst of all rabbles would be at an end, if every soldier were to be held answerable for the justice of every order in obedience to which he pulls his trigger. The Case of Glencoe was doubtless an extreme case: but it cannot easily be distinguished in principle from cases which, in war, are of ordinary occurrence.  Very terrible military executions are sometimes indispensable.  Humanity itself may require them….It is remarkable that no member of the Scottish Parliament proposed that any of the private men of Argyle’s regiment should be prosecuted for murder.  Absolute impunity was granted to everybody below the rank of serjeant.  Yet on what principle?  Surely, if military obedience was not a valid plea, every man who shot a McDonald on that horrible night was a murderer?

Should officers have resigned rather than carry out their orders?

In this case, disobedience was assuredly a moral duty: but it does not follow that obedience was a legal crime.

That sounds to me like common sense. What about the Scots Prime Minister, the Master of Stair?

Every argument which can be urged against punishing the soldier who executes the unjust and inhuman orders of his superior is an argument for punishing with the utmost rigour of the law the superior with whom the unjust and inhuman orders originate.  Where there can be no responsibility below, there should be double responsibility above. What the parliament of Scotland ought with one voice to have demanded was, not that a poor illiterate serjeant…should be hanged in the Grassmarket, but that the real murderer, the most politic, the most eloquent, the most powerful of Scottish statesmen, should be brought to a public trial and should, if found guilty, die the death of a felon….Unhappily the Estates, by extenuating the guilt of the chief offender, and, at the same time demanding that his humble agents should be treated with a severity beyond the law, made the stain which the massacre had left on the honour of the nation broader and deeper than before.

That analysis seems fair – even if it is distorted by the author’s need to be gentle with King William, one of his heroes, and the failure to mention in this context the hatred of the Campbells for their targets, the McDonalds.  You wonder how many of these killers were reluctant, and how many were actuated by what lawyers call ‘malice’. And it must take some acquired coldness to kill in cold blood members of a family you have lived, eaten, and slept with for so long, and some of whom were morally and legally incapable of committing any crime.

But people who say that the soldiers should have rebelled rather than comply with orders are postulating a very high moral standard, one that calls for immense courage, which may not be appreciated by the dependants of the soldier so called upon.

Very few people have the still strength or firm insight of Dietrich Bonhoeffer in Germany after Hitler became the Chancellor.

We have been silent witnesses of evil deeds; we have been drenched by many storms; we have learned the arts of equivocation and pretence; experience has made us suspicious of others and stopped us being truthful and open; intolerable conflicts have worn us down and even made us cynical.  Are we still of any use?  What we shall need is not geniuses, or cynics, or misanthropes, or clever tacticians, but plain, honest, straightforward men.  Will our inward power of resistance be strong enough, and our honesty with ourselves remorseless enough, for us to find our way back to simplicity and straightforwardness?

It took a hero even to ask the question.  Moral giants like Lincoln, Bonhoeffer and Mandela come along once or twice a century.  The rest of us just hope that we don’t get called on to seek to emulate them.  If we do, and if we fail, as is most likely, then the judgment will belong not to us or the law, but to God.

This sordid affair was all Scottish.  The avengers took the view that the ends justified the means.  In doing so, they sank below the level of those whom they attacked.  It’s a lesson on how not now to respond to terrorism.  Lawyers have a saying that hard cases make bad law.  If you stretch or bend the law for a tricky or hard case, you make the law worse.  You debauch it.  That, too, is a lesson of the massacre at Glencoe.

Another post

The other day I was driving my Mini in the Grampians listening to Gibbon’s Decline and Fall when it got to one of my favourite parts – the luscious put-down of the Emperor Gallienus.  I was laughing out loud, and then my mood changed when I heard a passage which I have read and heard before, but which I could not recall.  Gibbon referred to ‘a most savage mandate’ Gallienus issued after he had put down a revolt by a man called Ingenuus, who had assumed the purple (claimed the title of Emperor) in the provinces.  The mandate was indeed savage, but it had a revoltingly modern air to it.

It is not enough that you exterminate such as have appeared in arms: the chance of battle might have served me as effectually.  The male sex of every age must be extirpated; provided that in the execution of the children and old men, you can contrive means to save our reputation.  Let everyone die who has dropped an expression, who has entertained a thought against me, against me, the son of Valerian, the father and brother of so many princes.  Remember that Ingenuus was made emperor: tear, kill, hew in pieces.  I write to you with my own hand, and would inspire you with my own feelings.

All that is revolting, but the modern part is that in bold.  And the word ‘extirpate’ immediately brought to mind the mandate that led to the infamous massacre at Glencoe.  It occurred about thirteen hundred years after the extirpation of the followers of Ingenuus, and is so movingly described by the other great English composer of history, T B Macaulay.

The tribal conflicts left the Highlands in a savage state.  The clan MacDonald had an awful reputation for outlawry.  Their blood enemies were the Campbells.  (Still now in Australia you might hesitate to ask a MacDonald to break bread with a Campbell.)  The new king, King William III, asked the clans to take an oath of loyalty.  The Macdonald chief was a day late in turning up and his enemies saw their chance to get even.

The Scot responsible for managing the clans was the Master of Stair.  ‘He justly thought it was monstrous that a third part of Scotland should be in a state scarcely less savage than New Guinea…..In his view the clans, as they existed, were the plagues of the kingdom; and of all the clans the worst was that which inhabited Glencoe….In his private correspondence, he applied to them the short and terrible form of words in which the implacable Roman pronounced the doom of Carthage.  His project was no less than this, that the whole hill country from sea to sea, and the neighbouring islands, should be wasted with fire and sword, that the Camerons, the Macleans, and all the branches of the race of Macdonald should be rooted out.’  (The word ‘race’ is there used for ‘clan’.  The word ‘extirpation’ is built on the Latin word stirps, meaning the stem or block of a tree, and the OED quotes Macaulay in support of its definition ‘to root out, exterminate; to render extinct.’)

The Master of Stair was dire in his directive.

Your troops will destroy the country of Lochaber, Lochiel’s lands, Glengarry’s and Glencoe’s.  Your power shall be large enough.  I hope the soldiers will not trouble the government with prisoners.

Troops of the Campbells accepted the hospitality of the Macdonalds over twelve days and then, like Macbeth, murdered their hosts.  Many escaped, but about thirty-eight were murdered – that is the word – and perhaps many more died of the cold or starvation.  The massacre proceeded under an order signed by King William that included these words.

As for Mac Ian of Glencoe and that tribe, if they can be well distinguished from the other Highlanders, it will be proper, for the vindication of public justice, to exterminate that set of thieves.

That was not a lawful order for a king to give in a nation that subscribed to the rule of law –which says that people are ruled by laws not people, and that they are only to be punished for a breach of those laws, and not at the arbitrary whim of the monarch.

Well, it was unlikely that anyone down the line would take that point, even had they wanted to.  And it is plain enough that extirpation in this context means extermination.  And that apparently is how the Campbells saw their authority and duty – to commit mass murder.  It is not to be supposed that they could have reported to the Master of Stair, or their king: ‘We shot and killed a dozen, but the others promised to behave in the future, so we stopped the killing.’  Among other things, they would be leaving witnesses to an act of infamy that no decent person could want to see the light of day; and the vendettas would have made Sicilian fishermen look decidedly docile.

But this was a problem for our author.  He was a bigger fan of William of Orange than all the people of Belfast put together.  Had his hero given a warrant for ethnic cleansing, if not genocide?  (Remember that the historian used the word ‘race.’)  Macaulay said that people as high as kings – he might have added me and my tax returns – rarely read a lot of what they sign.  That is true enough – but we all have to live with the consequences of so acting.

But Macaulay gets into trouble saying that ‘extirpate’ has more than one meaning – in this context.

It is one of the first duties of every government to extirpate gangs of thieves.  This does not mean that every thief ought to be treacherously assassinated in his sleep, or even that every thief ought to be put to death after a fair trial, but that every gang as a gang, ought to be completely broken up, and that whatever severity is indispensably necessary for that end ought to be used.

That’s like kids playing marbles behind the shelter shed and making up the rules as they go.  You don’t authorise or order a killing in ambiguous terms.  Nor do you make the killing subject to a value judgment – that this killing is ‘indispensably necessary’ to effect ‘extirpation’ – what if the family of a deceased and a prosecutor appointed by a government of a different colour come to a different result, and the executioner finds himself on a murder charge for doing what he reasonably believed to be his lawful duty.  (And the history of revolutions is full of instances where the executioners are among the first to die when their government falls.)

(Macaulay comes across this difficulty again when, much later, he discusses the government findings on the massacre.  The finding was that the massacre was murder and was not authorised by the King’s warrant.  But the report merely censured the real author of the crime, the Master of Stair, and recommended that some officers down to the rank of sergeant be charged with murder.  Macaulay says this was dead wrong.  (If it matters, I agree.)  ‘They had slain nobody whom they had not been positively directed by their commanding officer not to slay.  That subordination without which an army is the worst of all rabbles would be at an end if every soldier were to be held answerable for the justice of every order in obedience to which he pulls his trigger….Who then is to decide whether there be an emergency such as makes severity the truest mercy? Who is to determine whether it be or not be necessary to lay a thriving town in ashes, to decimate a large body of mutineers, to shoot a whole gang of banditti?…..And if the general rule be that the responsibility is with the commanding officer, and not with those who obey him, is it possible to find any reason for pronouncing the case of Glencoe an exception to that rule?’  All that seems very right to me, and the government response looks like another case of the Establishment looking after itself.)

Macaulay then makes his case worse by referring to Hastings’ dealings with the Pindarees, and Bentinck and the Thugs.  Any reference to different kinds of savagery is only likely to inflame the issue, and the Scots.

Finally, he says that another example of the soft use of ‘extirpate’ is in the coronation oath in Scotland when the king swears ‘to root out heresies.’  Heretics were commonly burnt then, but a heresy is not a person and cannot be put to death.  Macaulay says that King William asked what this meant and the Earl of Argyle (the Campbell chief, as it happens) was authorised by the Estates at Edinburgh to say that ‘the words did not imply persecution.’  The politest thing that you can say about that is that it is plain silly.

A simpler explanation for the liability of the English for the massacre at Glencoe was that this was just a manifestation of the evil that had already plagued England for two centuries in its dealings with Ireland, and which had descended to a new low point under that religious fanatic named Cromwell – their contempt for people they regarded as being of an inferior race.

Well, a painter of history as gorgeous as Macaulay is entitled to the odd blemish.  And the people of Glencoe have moved on.  Or at least their publican has.  I have visited the site on three occasions, and if you visit my second loo, you will find a framed collage of scenes of Glencoe, in the middle of which is a photo of a brass sign on the front door of the pub: ‘NO HAWKERS OR CAMPBELLS.’

Finally, because I regard Macaulay’s account of the massacre as one of the glories of our letters, I just read it again.  People like Gibbon, Macaulay and Carlyle don’t write history –they compose it, or paint it, or write an opera about it.  For the first time, I think, I read the long footnote in which Macaulay mentioned his only two sources.  One was the government Report of 1695.  The other was a contemporary pamphlet that helped blow up the cover-up.  It was called Gallienus Redivivus.  It was published well before Gibbon, but its author was aware of the mandate of Gallienus that I have set out above, and part of which Macaulay quotes.  ‘Gallienus ordered the whole province to be laid waste, and wrote to one of his lieutenants in language to which that of the Master of Stair bore but too much resemblance.’  The man who said that there is nothing new under the sun was dead right on this point.

Glencoe – massacres – extirpation – ethnic cleansing., , , , ,

Passing Bull 376 – Sense about negotiation

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The Age today has an excellent note by an Irish member of the team that negotiated the Good Friday Agreement.  There is some great advice to those who might be involved in major corporate or community settlements.

A successful negotiation calls for strong leadership all round.  There is an absence of trust on both sides.  A strong leader is called on to bring doubters on side and take the risk of compromising with a sworn enemy.  F W de Kerk said that the toughest discussions are not with your adversary, but within your own side.  It is in your own private room that the real hard work takes place, but you must try to avoid splitting your delegation. 

You have to be able to sell the agreement on both sides.  ‘You have to let the other person get up from the table with their trousers on.’  But if you drive too hard a bargain, the settlement may not hold.  It may be necessary, therefore, to leave some elastic so that each side has something to offer to its own. 

A basic rule in the Northern Ireland discussions was that nothing was agreed until everything was agreed.  (A mediator can stipulate that no deal is binding in law until there are some signed terms on the table.)  Additionally, the talks were fully inclusive, and no major group with popular support was excluded.  And they agreed that no atrocity outside the talks would be allowed to derail them.

I have encountered those difficulties in big bust-ups, but this is the background to one of the most difficult settlements in history.

Thackeray on Turner and The Fighting Temeraire

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The Fighting Téméraire is my favourite painting.  So it is for the English.  If you want to know why, read the views of William Makepeace Thackeray set out below.  The painting for me is like parts of Shakespeare or Mozart – a show stopper that renders language useless.  But they did not have to wait a century for people to get the point.

‘If you are particularly anxious to know what is the best picture in the room, not the biggest, and exactly contrary to the best, I must request you to turn your attention to a noble river-piece by J. W. M. Turner, Esquire, R.A., “The Fighting Téméraire” — as grand a painting as ever figured on the walls of any Academy, or came from the easel of any painter. The old Téméraire is dragged to her last home by a little, spiteful, diabolical steamer. A mighty red sun, amidst a host of flaring clouds, sinks to rest on one side of the picture, and illumines a river that seems interminable, and a countless navy that fades away into such a wonderful distance as never was painted before. The little demon of a steamer is belching out a volume (why do I say a volume? not a hundred volumes could express it) of foul, lurid, red-hot, malignant smoke, paddling furiously, and lashing up the water round about it; while behind it (a cold grey moon looking down on it), slow, sad, and majestic, follows the brave old ship, with death, as it were, written on her. I think we ought not, in common gratitude, to sacrifice entirely these noble old champions of ours, but that we should have somewhere a museum of their skeletons, which our children might visit, and think of the brave deeds which were done in them. The bones of the Agammemnon and the Captain, the Vanguard, the Culloden, and the Victory ought to be sacred relics, for Englishmen to worship almost. Think of them when alive, and braving the battle and the breeze, they carried Nelson and his heroes victorious by the cape of Saint Vincent, in the dark waters of Aboukir, and through the fatal conflict of Trafalgar. All these things, my dear Bricabrac, are, you will say, absurd, and not to the purpose. Be it so; but Bowbellites as we are, we Cockneys feel our hearts leap up when we recall them to memory; and every clerk in Threadneedle Street feels the strength of a Nelson, when he thinks of the mighty actions performed by him.

It is absurd, you will say (and with a great deal of reason), for Titmarsh, or any other Briton, to grow so politically enthusiastic about a four-foot canvas, representing a ship, a steamer, a river, and a sunset. But herein surely lies the power of the great artist. He makes you see and think of a great deal more than the objects before you; he knows how to soothe or intoxicate, to fire or to depress, by a few notes, or forms, or colours, of which we cannot trace the effect to the source, but only acknowledge the power. I recollect some years ago, at the theatre at Weimar, hearing Beethoven’s “Battle of Vittoria,” in which, amidst a storm of glorious music, the air of ” God save the King” was introduced. The very instant it began, every Englishman in the house was bolt upright, and so stood reverently until the air was played out. Why so? From some such thrill of excitement as makes us glow and rejoice over Mr. Turner and his “Fighting Téméraire” which I am sure, when the art of translating colours into music or poetry shall be discovered, will be found to be a magnificent national ode or piece of music.

I must tell you, however, that Mr. Turner’s performances are the most part quite incomprehensible. to me; and that his other pictures, which he is pleased to call “Cicero at his Villa,” “Agrippina with the Ashes of Germanicus,” “Pluto carrying off Proserpina,” or what you will, are not a whit more natural, or less mad, than they used to be in former years, since he has taken nature, or attempted (like your French barbers) to embellish it…. O ye gods ! why will he not stick to copying her majestical countenance, instead of daubing it with some absurd antics of his own?’

Passing Bull 375 – Nonsense about a cricketer

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Passing Bull 375 – Nonsense about a cricketer

Where we live here in Australia, it is not unlawful to say something that is unreasonable, unhinged, or likely to offend someone.  It is different in Iran, Russia, or Turkey. 

But an Australian cricketer, Usman Khawaja, as decent a national representative as we are likely to see, is being roundly castigated for making what are called ‘motherhood’ statements.  Among other things, it is said that in the context of a dreadful war, the statements are ‘political’. 

To the extent that you can give any meaning to that kind of weasel proposition, it is bloody dangerous.  The last form of speech you want to shut down is ‘political’ speech.  That is why people who want to undermine decency in public life move to stop people speaking out against them.  And war being the scourge of humanity, it is vital that people are free to say so.  The greatest crimes against humanity have been committed by people who so terrified others that they kept silent in the face of the crimes of their government.

There are two paintings that are monuments not just to Spanish art but to civilisation – and not just western civilisation.  They are The Third of May 1808 by Goya, and Guernica by Picasso.  They are and have been admired and revered throughput the world.  They are protests against, and denunciations of, the horrors of war by two of the greatest painters we have known.  And each artist obviously invested what might be called his soul into the painting.  And, if you wanted to, you might say that each painting involved a statement that might be called moral, or political, or worse – propaganda.  (For example, Guernica makes clear that the main victims of the bombing were women and children.)

Any such statement about either painting being ‘political’ would add precisely nothing to our understanding of the world, but I have not heard it said that Goya should also have also put forward the views of Napoleon and the Vatican on his subject, or that Picasso should have also put forward the views of Hitler, Franco, Mussolini and the Vatican on his subject.  (Franco saw himself as standing for Christendom and engaged the clergy in his missions of death.)

Sadly, there are times when the level of what passes for debate about the current war in the Middle East fails to rise above a squabble between seven-year-olds behind the State School shelter shed and the universal riposte – ‘Well – you started it!’ 

In the name of Heaven, you can be scolded for suggesting that people should stop killing each other – at least for a while.  The word ‘ceasefire’ is apparently fraught – very fraught.

And may I come back to art and politics or morals?  Have you ever felt like me at a place like the Uffizi Gallery – ‘If I see just one more half-naked bloke dying in agony of open wounds, I will throw up on the bloody spot, and get out of this chamber horrors forever’?  When you look at the art of what we call the Renaissance, all that stuff that Kenneth Clark moons over, how much of it was not full-on propaganda for what was then in the process of ceasing to be the one universal church?

Blessings for Christmas – if I may be permitted either of those terms.

Khawaja – Gaza - freedom of speech – offensive language,

The fog of war

/ Geoffrey Gibson / 1 Comment

Correspondence about the conflict in Gaza prompts the following.

What is the legal basis of this war?  As I follow it, there is no nation or entity of Gaza.  In what sense is its government recognised, either as being authorised to speak for the people of Gaza, or otherwise recognised as an identifiable entity?  In other words, what people are identifiable as the respondents to the declaration of war and the invasion?  Who has what authority to speak for the government or people of Gaza?

The commentary on either side is partisan.  The main reproach of one side for the other is that it is partisan.  This is predictable and funny in discussing a football match.  It is neither in this tragic and lethal context.  The main complaint is that the other side does not concede enough about its fault, or the suffering it has caused.  This follows necessarily from partisanship, and failing to agree at what point in history you set the clock running for past events to be counted for or against either party.

One side says the other wants to annihilate it.  The other says its enemy has stopped it being born.

This is a form of guerrilla war.  The rules of war are hard to apply.  How do you tell ‘civilians’ from those who are not?  At what ratio of casualties does defence cease to be proportionate?

On both sides ‘freedom of speech’ becomes illusory.  It is at best odd to suggest that people should not be partisan – by talking about their case rather than that of their enemy.

If truth is the first casualty of war, sense and fairness are fast in line.

As it happens, while writing the above my eye fell on what Macaulay said about religious fanatics.  The English were not sorry to see the end of the Puritans.  Their mark on the U S is indelible.  Fortunately, they missed us.  Under Cromwell, they wanted to shut the pubs.

While the majority of the Anglican clergy quitted, in one direction, the position which they had originally occupied, the majority of the Puritan body departed, in a direction diametrically opposite, from the principles and practices of their fathers. The persecution which the separatists had undergone had been severe enough to irritate, but not severe enough to destroy. They had been, not tamed into submission, but baited into savageness and stubbornness. After the fashion of oppressed sects, they mistook their own vindictive feelings for emotions of piety, encouraged in themselves by reading and meditation, a disposition to brood over their wrongs, and, when they had worked themselves up into hating their enemies, imagined that they were only hating the enemies of heaven. In the New Testament there was little indeed which, even when perverted by the most disingenuous exposition, could seem to countenance the indulgence of malevolent passions. But the Old Testament contained the history of a race selected by God to be witnesses of his unity and ministers of his vengeance, and specially commanded by him to do many things which, if done without his special command, would have been atrocious crimes. In such a history it was not difficult for fierce and gloomy spirits to find much that might be distorted to suit their wishes. The extreme Puritans therefore began to feel for the Old Testament a preference, which, perhaps, they did not distinctly avow even to themselves; but which showed itself in all their sentiments and habits. They paid to the Hebrew language a respect which they refused to that tongue in which the discourses of Jesus and the epistles of Paul have come down to us. They baptized their children by the names, not of Christian saints, but of Hebrew patriarchs and warriors. In defiance of the express and reiterated declarations of Luther and Calvin, they turned the weekly festival by which the Church had, from the primitive times, commemorated the resurrection of her Lord, into a Jewish Sabbath. They sought for principles of jurisprudence in the Mosaic law, and for precedents to guide their ordinary conduct in the books of Judges and Kings. Their thoughts and discourse ran much on acts which were assuredly not recorded as examples for our imitation. The prophet who hewed in pieces a captive king, the rebel general who gave the blood of a queen to the dogs, the matron who, in defiance of plighted faith, and of the laws of eastern hospitality, drove the nail into the brain of the fugitive ally who had just fed at her board, and who was sleeping under the shadow of her tent, were proposed as models to Christians suffering under the tyranny of princes and prelates. Morals and manners were subjected to a code resembling that of the synagogue, when the synagogue was in its worst state. The dress, the deportment, the language, the studies, the amusements of the rigid sect were regulated on principles not unlike those of the Pharisees who, proud of their washed hands and broad phylacteries, taunted the Redeemer as a sabbath-breaker and a winebibber. It was a sin to hang garlands on a Maypole, to drink a friend’s health, to fly a hawk, to hunt a stag, to play at chess, to wear love-locks, to put starch into a ruff, to touch the virginals, to read the Fairy Queen. Rules such as these, rules which would have appeared insupportable to the free and joyous spirit of Luther, and contemptible to the serene and philosophical intellect of Zwingli, threw over all life a more than monastic gloom. The learning and eloquence by which the great Reformers had been eminently distinguished, and to which they had been, in no small measure, indebted for their success, were regarded by the new school of Protestants with suspicion, if not with aversion. Some precisians had scruples about teaching the Latin grammar, because the names of Mars, Bacchus, and Apollo occurred in it. The fine arts were all but proscribed. The solemn peal of the organ was superstitious. The light music of Ben Jonson’s masques was dissolute. Half the fine paintings in England were idolatrous, and the other half indecent. The extreme Puritan was at once known from other men by his gait, his garb, his lank hair, the sour solemnity of his face, the upturned white of his eyes, the nasal twang with which he spoke, and above all, by his peculiar dialect. He employed, on every occasion, the imagery and style of Scripture. Hebraisms violently introduced into the English language, and metaphors borrowed from the boldest lyric poetry of a remote age and country, and applied to the common concerns of English life, were the most striking peculiarities of this cant, which moved, not without cause, the derision both of Prelatists and libertines.

Thus the political and religious schism which had originated in the sixteenth century was, during the first quarter of the seventeenth century, constantly widening. Theories tending to Turkish despotism were in fashion at Whitehall. Theories tending to republicanism were in favour with a large portion of the House of Commons. The violent Prelatists who were, to a man, zealous for prerogative, and the violent Puritans who were, to a man, zealous for the privileges of Parliament, regarded each other with animosity more intense than that which, in the preceding generation, had existed between Catholics and Protestants.

Passing Bull 374 – Appealing to the mob

/ Geoffrey Gibson / Leave a comment

According to Shakespeare, the mob went wild when Caesar refused the crown.  They loved him even more when he failed physically in front of them.  He could be one of them!

He could also be like Trump – who said he could shoot someone on Fifth Avenue and his followers would not blink. 

Casca had seen it all.

Marry, before he fell down, when he perceived the common herd was glad he refused the crown, he plucked me ope his doublet and offered them his throat to cut.  An I had been a man of any occupation, if I would not have taken him at a word, I would I might go to hell among the rogues.  And so he fell.  When he came to himself again, he said, if he had done or said anything amiss, he desired their worships to think it was his infirmity.  Three or four wenches, where I stood, cried ‘Alas, good soul!’ and forgave him with all their hearts: but there’s no heed to be taken of them; if Caesar had stabbed their mothers, they would have done no less.  (1.2.269-275)

A learned commentator (Philip Brockbank) says:

Caesar uses his histrionic abilities to satisfy his audience’s expectations, contriving to make himself appear not only more god like but also more human than ordinary mortals.  That tense and ambivalent relationship between the public and its leader can make or unmake tyrants – it is ready to go either way – the divergence effect of catastrophe theory.  Because the people are satisfied as spectators, it seems that they acquiesce in or participate in the casual terror of Caesar’s regime.

The playwright saw it all – if Caesar had stabbed their mothers, they would have done no less.

Except that Trump would not have refused the crown.  He can’t help himself. 

And in the play, the crowd is about to whipped up to havoc and the dogs of war by the most duplicitous piece of mob oratory known in our letters – and then they butcher an innocent poet in the Roman gutter. 

P J Brockbank was led to conclude his paper as follows.

The play was, and remains, capable of awaking its audiences to a fuller and more sympathetic understanding of the catastrophic dynamics of human community.  But if it teaches us to distrust our rulers, it also teaches us to distrust the distrusters.

Some pairs in King Lear

/ Geoffrey Gibson / Leave a comment

Two old men, King Lear and the Earl of Gloucester (or Gloster), drive a theme with two plot-lines.  They are both now past it, and they are out of touch with the next generation – which in their case contains predators to whom they are vulnerable.  They respond by casting out the innocent child.  If Hamlet is about angry young men, King Lear is about angry old men.

Two sisters compete for nastiness.  ‘Tigers, not daughters.’  Bradley looks to give the palm to Regan – notwithstanding that Goneril murders her, and offers to give the same medicine to her own husband in order to make room in her bed for the bastard.  Bradley remarked that Regan had ‘much less force, courage and initiative than her sister, and for that reason is less formidable and more loathsome.’  Tales of evil sisters have a long history, but these too are hard to beat.  When Regan says she is sick, Goneril, the poisoner, says, aside: ‘If not, I’ll ne’er trust medicine.’  The humour is very black and morbid at the end.  But Regan does have ‘Let him smell his way to Dover.’  And that is pure evil.  Perhaps Bradley had in mind that being weaker, and second in line, Regan was the crueller bully when she got her chance.

Two sons, and brothers of sorts, are very different.  The bastard lives up to the argot in his title.  Gloster’s legitimate son, Edgar, is very hardly done by, but he finishes in triumph, while taking out the bastard, and coming into power.

The two husbands of the evil sisters fall out almost immediately, we are told.  Cornwall is the archetypal villain.  Albany comes fully to understand his folly in marrying Goneril.  Cornwall gets his due from a servant – exquisite irony.  Albany is set to retire hurt.  He was not built for this sort of game.

Two members of the aristocracy – two nobles, if you prefer –react in their own way to events above them.  Kent is nothing if not forthright – and he is ferociously loyal.  He is the first out of the family to feel the wrath of the king in his descent into madness.  Gloster is appalled at what is happening, but he plays the role of the dutiful courtier.  But when civil war is started, he has to take sides, and he pays the ultimate price in the cruellest scene of this playwright outside of Titus Andronicus.

The two French wooers of Cordelia are very different.  Burgundy is naturally unsettled that the offer of wealth has been withdrawn by a cranky king of perfidious Albion.  (He takes the Macron view of commerce.)  France is curious and big hearted – but at the end, he picks a bad time to have an alternative engagement, and his wife is murdered.

Two victims stand out because they are effectively disinherited for no good reason – Cordelia and Edgar.  Cordelia is the victim of her father’s hot blood, and the evil of her sisters.  Edgar is the victim of the evil of his sibling, and the pompous rashness of his father.  Gloster commits what might be called the Othello mistake – he convicts a loved one without hearing from him first.  (The mechanics of the two frauds are very similar.)  By contrast, Lear puts some kind of test to his daughter, and then snaps when she refuses to play the game.  There is thus a symmetry of evil and rashness in the story of two of the principal victims.

Two characters are sacrificed because they are simply not up to it.  Neither Gloster nor Albany is set in anything like the heroic mould.  They are courtiers who make up the numbers and who become collateral damage.  Albany survives, but his interest in ruling has died, and it will be a while before he thinks of marrying again.  One such ‘interlude’ is enough.

Two characters are cracked in the head – the Fool by nature, and Poor Tom by design.  The first adds to the theatre; Poor Tom does not do that – at least for most audiences today.

Two are there to meet in a fight, like that at the OK corral – Edgar and Oswald.  And each is up for it.  But Kent was the more natural antagonist: ‘His [Oswald’s] countenance likes me not.’   On this form, he could become an honorary member of the Marylebone Cricket Club. 

(The spray that Kent gives Oswald at 2.2.14ff could excite the jealousy of the coach of Melbourne Storm.  He is justly famous for his sprays of his manly entourage.  One of the milder forms of abuse of Kent for Oswald is ‘the son and heir of a mongrel bitch.’  Speaking of Melbourne Storm and rugby league – which is not the upper-class version of rugby – at their first meeting, Kent labelled Oswald ‘you base football player.’  The Everyman annotation reads: ‘a low game played by idle boys to the scandal of sensible men.’  The football reference makes dating the action in the play even more difficult, but the analogy is now complete.  This play is about the heaviest of this playwright on the stage.  Kent on Oswald is the play’s one belly laugh, and it should be played for all it is worth – otherwise the audience, too, might go mad.)

And there is something of the mathematics of the western in the fugue of the finale – two of the black hats get taken out by two of the white hats. 

And, finally, there is also an element of Greek tragedy.  Lear, Gloster, and to some extent Albany, are cleansed and enlightened by their suffering – Bradley says ‘purified.’  Which is what members of the audience might aspire to as the curtain comes down, and they go out to face the world.

The purpose of the play is to answer the question: ‘Is man no more than this?’  For that purpose, we the audience take upon ourselves the mystery of things, ‘as if we were God’s spies.’  And the answer is that all that stands between us and the primal slime is about as strong as a Tallyho cigarette paper.  That is why the study of evil in the theatre of the grotesque of the ages in King Lear is seen as this author’s greatest work.

Shakespeare – theatre – drama.

Napoleon

/ Geoffrey Gibson / Leave a comment

Mr Justice T W Smith was regarded as the leading judge on our Supreme Court in his time.  He declined a knighthood.  They were not then automatically granted to those appointed to the Supreme Court of Victoria, but were in the gift of the government.  Smith, J thought that may be seen as an inducement to judges not to offend government.  He referred to what Napoleon said when asked why he had reinstituted a titled aristocracy.  ‘Because it is by such baubles that men are governed.’

François Furet was a leading historian of France.  One of his works is Revolutionary France, 1770-1880.  It gives perspective to the events known as the French Revolution – a consummation devoutly to be desired.  It runs to 537 pages of text.  Eight of those pages are devoted to the coronation of Napoleon, and they show in detail just what Napoleon meant by the ‘baubles’ by which men are governed.

Everything was researched and rehearsed in exquisite detail so that the Corsican could place the crown on his own head – and slight the pope.  He was following in the path of the Holy Roman Empire, and Charlemagne the Great.  But he would not grant latterday homage to Charlemagne.

I have raised myself up to my actions.  He [Charlemagne] stayed at the point where birth placed him.  To reign in France, one must be born in grandeur, have been seen from childhood in a palace with guards, or else be a man who is capable of standing out from all the others….Right of inheritance, if it is to be successful, must pass to children born in the bosom of greatness.

You would be hard pressed to find a better example of megalomania.

The coronation took place in Notre Dame on 2 December, 1804.  Louis XVI had been executed on 21 January 1793.  In the history of the entire world, had there ever been such a reversal?  The Emperor claimed, and could enforce, powers the Bourbons could hardly dream of. 

But after his final defeat at Waterloo, Napoleon left five million dead, France in ruins, and the shell of an army he had abandoned twice.  He lost because he could not stop fighting, and the nation of France was fractured for the rest of the nineteenth century.  It endured appalling revolutionary schisms in 1830, 1848, and 1870.  The last led to the nation’s worst defeat in war at Sedan.  France just survived the First World War, and then participated in the mad lust for revenge that led to the Second.  And just recently, the gillets jaunes showed that the readiness to revolt can outweigh dreams about the Emperor and la gloire.

In the space of one generation, France had gone from dreaming of a whole new regime according to the philosophical gospel of Rousseau to a rampant evangelical nationalism under a foreign emperor, and the result was a tragic mess.

Writing when the fulness of this tragedy had been revealed, Hippolyte Taine was understandably bitter.  Taine completed his vitriolic history of the Revolution at an ugly time for France, in 1884, when the nation was still trying to achieve a settled state, and was still recovering from the most recent aftershock, the appalling events of 1870.  The book concludes after looking at the bequest of Napoleon by saying:

In this philosophical barracks we have lived for eighty years.  Those barracks had seen ‘the omnipotence of the State, the omnipresence of government’ – ‘Never were finer barracks constructed, more symmetrical and more decorative in aspect, more satisfactory to superficial views, more acceptable to vulgar good sense, more suited to narrow egoism….’

The great French historian Georges Lefebvre said this of Napoleon at the end of a two-volume history of his life from 1799 to 1815:

Nor was it an accident that led to the dictatorship of a general.  But it so happened that this general was Napoleon Bonaparte, a man whose temperament, even more than his genius, was unable to adapt to peace and moderation.  Thus it was an unforeseeable contingency which tilted the scale in favour of ‘la guerre éternelle’ [eternal war]…

The great Napoleonic achievement – the establishment of a new dynasty and the building of a universal empire – ended in failure.  Hence the imagination of the poet has tended to see the Emperor as a second Prometheus whose daring was punished by the heavenly powers, and as a symbol of human genius at grips with fate….But a military dictatorship did not of itself necessitate the re-establishment of a hereditary monarchy, still less an aristocratic nobility.  Nor was the best means of defending the natural frontiers to be found in expanding beyond them and so giving rise to coalitions in self-defence.  Yet this was what Napoleon was personally responsible for setting in train.

….He had in fact become more and more hostile to the Revolution, to such a degree that if he had had the time, he would in the end have partly repudiated even civil equality; yet in the popular imagination, he was the hero of the Revolution….He had instituted the most rigorous despotism; yet it was in his name that the constitutional reign of the Bourbons was opposed….

Yet the Romantics were not wholly wrong about him, for his classicism was only one of culture and cast of mind.  His springs of action, his unconquerable energy of temperament, arose from the depths of his imagination.  Here lay the secret of the fascination that he will exercize for ever more on the individual person.  For men will always be haunted by romantic dreams of power, even if only in the passing fires and disturbances of youth; and there will thus never be wanting those who will come…to stand in ecstasy before the tomb.

Now, most us find it hard to be ‘romantic’ about war or death, and standing in ecstasy before the tomb might be reserved to those people in France who prefer romance to the frightful history of France after Napoleon.

I had wondered why the French celebrate Bastille Day.  I was there at the Travellers Club on the Champs Elysee when it looked like the masses might scale the fortress.  It would be idle to dream of equality at that address.  But they did start beheading people in public in Paris on 14 July 1789.

Mr Justice T W Smith was regarded as the leading judge on our Supreme Court in his time.  He declined a knighthood.  They were not then automatically granted to those appointed to the Supreme Court of Victoria, but were in the gift of the government.  Smith, J thought that may be seen as an inducement to judges not to offend government.  He referred to what Napoleon said when asked why he had reinstituted a titled aristocracy.  ‘Because it is by such baubles that men are governed.’

François Furet was a leading historian of France.  One of his works is Revolutionary France, 1770-1880.  It gives perspective to the events known as the French Revolution – a consummation devoutly to be desired.  It runs to 537 pages of text.  Eight of those pages are devoted to the coronation of Napoleon, and they show in detail just what Napoleon meant by the ‘baubles’ by which men are governed.

Everything was researched and rehearsed in exquisite detail so that the Corsican could place the crown on his own head – and slight the pope.  He was following in the path of the Holy Roman Empire, and Charlemagne the Great.  But he would not grant latterday homage to Charlemagne.

I have raised myself up to my actions.  He [Charlemagne] stayed at the point where birth placed him.  To reign in France, one must be born in grandeur, have been seen from childhood in a palace with guards, or else be a man who is capable of standing out from all the others….Right of inheritance, if it is to be successful, must pass to children born in the bosom of greatness.

You would be hard pressed to find a better example of megalomania.

The coronation took place in Notre Dame on 2 December, 1804.  Louis XVI had been executed on 21 January 1793.  In the history of the entire world, had there ever been such a reversal?  The Emperor claimed, and could enforce, powers the Bourbons could hardly dream of. 

But after his final defeat at Waterloo, Napoleon left five million dead, France in ruins, and the shell of an army he had abandoned twice.  He lost because he could not stop fighting, and the nation of France was fractured for the rest of the nineteenth century.  It endured appalling revolutionary schisms in 1830, 1848, and 1870.  The last led to the nation’s worst defeat in war at Sedan.  France just survived the First World War, and then participated in the mad lust for revenge that led to the Second.  And just recently, the gillets jaunes showed that the readiness to revolt can outweigh dreams about the Emperor and la gloire.

In the space of one generation, France had gone from dreaming of a whole new regime according to the philosophical gospel of Rousseau to a rampant evangelical nationalism under a foreign emperor, and the result was a tragic mess.

Writing when the fulness of this tragedy had been revealed, Hippolyte Taine was understandably bitter.  Taine completed his vitriolic history of the Revolution at an ugly time for France, in 1884, when the nation was still trying to achieve a settled state, and was still recovering from the most recent aftershock, the appalling events of 1870.  The book concludes after looking at the bequest of Napoleon by saying:

In this philosophical barracks we have lived for eighty years.  Those barracks had seen ‘the omnipotence of the State, the omnipresence of government’ – ‘Never were finer barracks constructed, more symmetrical and more decorative in aspect, more satisfactory to superficial views, more acceptable to vulgar good sense, more suited to narrow egoism….’

The great French historian Georges Lefebvre said this of Napoleon at the end of a two-volume history of his life from 1799 to 1815:

Nor was it an accident that led to the dictatorship of a general.  But it so happened that this general was Napoleon Bonaparte, a man whose temperament, even more than his genius, was unable to adapt to peace and moderation.  Thus it was an unforeseeable contingency which tilted the scale in favour of ‘la guerre éternelle’ [eternal war]…

The great Napoleonic achievement – the establishment of a new dynasty and the building of a universal empire – ended in failure.  Hence the imagination of the poet has tended to see the Emperor as a second Prometheus whose daring was punished by the heavenly powers, and as a symbol of human genius at grips with fate….But a military dictatorship did not of itself necessitate the re-establishment of a hereditary monarchy, still less an aristocratic nobility.  Nor was the best means of defending the natural frontiers to be found in expanding beyond them and so giving rise to coalitions in self-defence.  Yet this was what Napoleon was personally responsible for setting in train.

….He had in fact become more and more hostile to the Revolution, to such a degree that if he had had the time, he would in the end have partly repudiated even civil equality; yet in the popular imagination, he was the hero of the Revolution….He had instituted the most rigorous despotism; yet it was in his name that the constitutional reign of the Bourbons was opposed….

Yet the Romantics were not wholly wrong about him, for his classicism was only one of culture and cast of mind.  His springs of action, his unconquerable energy of temperament, arose from the depths of his imagination.  Here lay the secret of the fascination that he will exercize for ever more on the individual person.  For men will always be haunted by romantic dreams of power, even if only in the passing fires and disturbances of youth; and there will thus never be wanting those who will come…to stand in ecstasy before the tomb.

Now, most us find it hard to be ‘romantic’ about war or death, and standing in ecstasy before the tomb might be reserved to those people in France who prefer romance to the frightful history of France after Napoleon.

I had wondered why the French celebrate Bastille Day.  I was there at the Travellers Club on the Champs Elysee when it looked like the masses might scale the fortress.  It would be idle to dream of equality at that address.  But they did start beheading people in public in Paris on 14 July 1789.

World Cup

/ Geoffrey Gibson / Leave a comment

The World Cup in cricket was a great result for Australia. 

Big games turn on character.  This team has it, and it has character as a team.  It is obviously very well led and coached.  You can tell that from their demeanour on and off the field.  The captain, coaches and selectors deserve all the praise they are getting. 

I cannot recall a better run outfit wearing my colours than the squad that has just won the World Cup.  I can recall disasters – under people like Langer or Michael Clarke. 

And the previous winners were infected by an arrogance that still showed itself in the denigration of Cummins – who is in my view the model for captain of the Australian cricket team.  Which makes him about the most important person in Australia.  (The white ants are as helpful as the RSL on Vietnam veterans.)

The final was set up by the three quicks and the best fielding in the competition.  (The semi-final was in my view decided on fielding.)  I think the selectors have struck the right balance in both bowling and batting.  Zampa is now a strike bowler, as good as any.  Smith and Marnus give the batting test match ballast, and Marnus and Warner set the tone for fielding.  The scene was set precisely to suit Marnus in our innings.  He is just the foil for hitters off the leash like Maxwell or Head.  When the third wicket fell, Ian Smith called the reaction of Head and Marnus one of ‘absolute courage.’ Marnus would be about the first bloke I would pick. 

And every team needs cheer leaders and talismen.

Good luck to all of them.  This is what Australian cricket is capable of and what we should get.  And what our children should grow up with.

The national footy codes, with the exception of the Matildas and, on a good day, the boys, can just look on and weep.

Finally, a word for those gentlemen at Lord’s who insulted those wearing my colours – you have not, and you never will, put a team in the field as good as this one of mine.

World Cup

The World Cup in cricket was a great result for Australia. 

Big games turn on character.  This team has it, and it has character as a team.  It is obviously very well led and coached.  You can tell that from their demeanour on and off the field.  The captain, coaches and selectors deserve all the praise they are getting. 

I cannot recall a better run outfit wearing my colours than the squad that has just won the World Cup.  I can recall disasters – under people like Langer or Michael Clarke. 

And the previous winners were infected by an arrogance that still showed itself in the denigration of Cummins – who is in my view the model for captain of the Australian cricket team.  Which makes him about the most important person in Australia.  (The white ants are as helpful as the RSL on Vietnam veterans.)

The final was set up by the three quicks and the best fielding in the competition.  (The semi-final was in my view decided on fielding.)  I think the selectors have struck the right balance in both bowling and batting.  Zampa is now a strike bowler, as good as any.  Smith and Marnus give the batting test match ballast, and Marnus and Warner set the tone for fielding.  The scene was set precisely to suit Marnus in our innings.  He is just the foil for hitters off the leash like Maxwell or Head.  When the third wicket fell, Ian Smith called the reaction of Head and Marnus one of ‘absolute courage.’ Marnus would be about the first bloke I would pick. 

And every team needs cheer leaders and talismen.

Good luck to all of them.  This is what Australian cricket is capable of and what we should get.  And what our children should grow up with.

The national footy codes, with the exception of the Matildas and, on a good day, the boys, can just look on and weep.

Finally, a word for those gentlemen at Lord’s who insulted those wearing my colours – you have not, and you never will, put a team in the field as good as this one of mine.

Secret deals in government

/ Geoffrey Gibson / Leave a comment

A political row in England erupted when a sacked Minister accused her Prime Minister of breaching a secret deal between them.  She says that to secure her support in his bid for the top job, she extracted promises from him about government policy – relating, say, to the government of Northern Ireland. 

Neither would or could allege that any such agreement could be binding in law.  But it is said be binding in honour – that is, morally binding.

But how could this be so?  A Minister of the Crown is in a position of trust.  He or she must act in good faith, and avoid assuming obligations to others that might conflict with the obligations of their office.  And they must account candidly to the public for the way they discharge their duty.

They cannot do that if they have subjected themselves to an obligation to another as to how they will conduct their office which they cannot divulge to the public.

And that is before you get to the question: Why did the deal have to be secret?

Ministers of the Crown must have the confidence of Parliament and the King.  They are obliged by their office to give true counsel to the King – that is, they are obliged to give such advice as they consider best suited to the nature of the case.  And they must candidly account for the way they discharge such obligations. 

Ministers fail in discharging those obligations if they undertake obligations with third parties about the way they will perform them in a way that precludes them from revealing such undertakings to other people.

Of course compromises and deals are the stuff of politics – but not when they have the consequences referred to above.

The deal referred to in the press was said to have been made between one Minister and another.  Imagine the uproar if the other was not a Minister, but Rupert Murdoch, Arthur Scargill, or Vladimir Putin.

That these considerations go unremarked shows how far we have fallen.